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2012/07/24

Angela Brinskele, Mazer Lesbian Archives, West Hollywood, USA: Using Social Media and Oral Histories to promote and gain support for your organization regardless of your budget.

"Every oral history is digitally recorded but now video clips are recorded as well, which we then use to share and promote the project online."

Mazer's "True Life Lesbian History Project"

Angela Brinskele is the Director of Communications for the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives.

She has been working with the Archives for over five years. Angela is also a professional photographer who has been documenting the LGBT community in Southern California for over 25 years with a special focus on Lesbians. In this paper she gives an overview of how the Mazer Lesbian Archives uses social media "to promote, present, inform and educate as well as gain access to new supporters."

How do you use social media? How do you raise funds online? What projects do you use to reach out and grab people’s interest?

To read the full paper click on "read more". Share, discuss, comment and enjoy!

UsingSocial Media and Oral Histories to promote and gain support
for your

organization regardless of your
budget.

Our
use of Social Media

The
Mazerweb sitewww.mazerlesbianarchives.orgis generally used as our base
online.Everything we do gets on
the site and then details go out to all the social media which we use to
promote, present, inform and educate as well as gain access to new
supporters.We have donation buttons
and all the necessary information about visiting, supporting and experiencing
the archives can be found here.

Wordpress andJoomla are just two of the many free website platforms you
can use for your site.

Facebookis used most of all
the social media as we have found it to be the most successful of all social
media in gaining the interest of new people and getting them more involved with
our Archives.It is also a place
where we can be a bit more casual with things like sharing some of our holdings
like a single photo or to promote our events.We especially use it to appreciate others who are doing
similar work by sharing or commenting on that work.

Facebook
accounts are free and you just need to create an
account at and add content.facebook.com

Twitter is used in a more limited way.We generally just send out a quick link to anything posted
on our site as a kind of a shout out with links to more information elsewhere.

Twitter is free and you just need to create
an account and add your content.twitter.com

Blogger is used to cross promote and show more details of something we have
posted on our site.This is a
place where we are likely to share videos, photos and photo galleries and specific
stories many things that have been digitized from the archives that we think
will interest people around the world.

Blogger is free you just need to create an
account or sign in through a Google account and add your content.blogger.com

YouTube is used specifically to show only our own videos created by the
Mazer to promote and educate as well as to give an introduction to some of the
women in our Oral Histories Project.Youtube is free and it allows you to create your own “channel” with all
your own videos. youtube.com

Constant
Contact is a mass email service we use for an
annual fee.It is used for every
event we have.We send emails out to
local supporters as well as supporters and followers worldwide. This helps us keep
everyone “in the loop” and up to date about all our events and activities.We use it for fundraising by adding
live “donate” buttons into the emails that can be clicked on to make an
immediate donation.We also use
emails to announce special occasions or projects.

Oral
Histories The Mazer has been collecting oral
histories for many years but in the past these have only been available to
researchers or visitors to the physical archive.We now have a new oral histories project called, “True Life
Lesbian Oral Histories Project.”Every oral history is digitally recorded but now video clips are
recorded as well, which we then use to share and promote the project online
.Our most current entry is a clip
of two women who have been together for over 50 years.They tell the story of how they met and
how one of them ran away (went AWOL) from military service to be with the
other.Here is a link to that clip:
(http://youtu.be/dboo23tO-MY)

How do you use social media?How do you raise funds online?

What projects do you use to reach out and
grab people’s interest?

What things do you do to educate, promote
and inform folks about your collections?

How much time and money should you spend?

BIO

Angela Brinskele

Angela Brinskele is the Director of
Communications for the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives.

She has been working with the Archives for
over five years.Angela is also a
professional photographer who has been documenting the LGBT community in
Southern California for over 25 years with a special focus on Lesbians.

2 comments:

Angele, I think this is a really interesting topic and one that is very relevant for the LGBTI ALMS 2012 community. Online networking - the online possibilities - and offline networking are two valuable toolsets to be able to use as heritage professionals. Underlying the use of the online networking possibilities is of course the goal: what you are wanting to achieve. In fact, each of the tools supports the main goal, and in your case that is, beautifully said, "promote, present, inform and educate as well as gain access to new supporters".Do you use stakeholder analysis in deciding who to target, and when? Stakeholder analysis allows you to define who is an important actor relative to your goal. You can start quite randomly naming actors (individuals, institutions, bodies) and then placing them on a grid. Do they have a high interest or a low interest in what you do? Do you want them to have a higher or a lower interest? Do they have high power to influence outcomes, or low power? If they have low interest and high power you will want to think of strategies to increase their interests and you will look at others on the grid to see how they can help you in your strategy. When preparing for this conference for example we realised that academics are an important group to have at the table AND that many academics (don't all jump on me at one!) are not great at reading blogs. So we have to have other strategies to inform them, like email-based discussions and lists they subscribe to.You talk about using social media for fundraising. I hope you can go into some detail on this at the conference. In Europe we do not have a great tradition of philanthropy, or should I say it is unusual for many civil society organisations to crowd source their finances. This has important repercussions. For example, we have a terrible economy at the moment and funding organisations have less money to give. Many organisations are used to having funding. Now they have none. We need to learn to ask people for small gifts of money, to make specific activities possible. You have a lot to teach us in this area. I look forward to hearing more!

Lin, You bring up many good points and maybe the academics will all jump on you at once and you will have dragged them to the blog in spite of themselves! We need tools like the grid you mentioned as it sounds like a great way to measure and keep track of people and funding. It sounds like you are saying that most orgs there are funded by something other than individuals. This is the worst economic time in my lifetime for raising money but statistics show that individuals or small donors continue to be willing to give even in these times. So maybe that is where some significant change will take place. We will all have to learn better how to ask people for small gifts. It sounds like we can learn a great deal from each other.